Old USAEst. 1776

Era · 1900–2000

The 20th Century

Skyscrapers, monuments, and modern memorials — the century that produced most of America's best-known landmarks.

36 landmarks across 15 states and the District of Columbia. Start with Alcatraz Island, Mount Rushmore and Lincoln Memorial.

Landmarks: 36
Period: 1900–2000

Browse the landmarks Open in the directory

Alcatraz Island, San Francisco, California — Pictured Alcatraz Island
Kate Nevens · CC BY · via Wikimedia Commons

— The register —

The Landmarks

The 20th Century
Alcatraz Island
San Francisco, CA
Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay held one of the earliest U.S. military fortifications on the West Coast and, from 1934 to 1963, the federal government's most secure and notorious penitentiary.
The 20th Century
Mount Rushmore
Keystone, SD
Mount Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota's Black Hills depicts the 60-foot-tall faces of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, carved directly into a granite mountainside.
The 20th Century
Lincoln Memorial
Washington, DC
The Lincoln Memorial honors Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president, who led the United States through the Civil War and the end of slavery.
The 20th Century
Hearst Castle
San Simeon, CA
Hearst Castle is the grandest expression of Gilded Age ambition in the American West — a hilltop palace that newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst built to house one of the largest private art collections in the country.
The 20th Century
Golden Gate Bridge
San Francisco, CA
The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most celebrated feats of engineering in the world and the defining symbol of San Francisco.
The 20th Century
Gateway Arch
St. Louis, MO
The Gateway Arch is the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere and the defining symbol of St. Louis.
The 20th Century
Empire State Building
New York, NY
The Empire State Building is the most famous skyscraper in the world and an enduring symbol of New York City and the American 20th century.
The 20th Century
Hoover Dam
Boulder City, NV
Hoover Dam is one of the greatest engineering achievements in American history — a colossal wall of concrete that tamed the Colorado River in the depths of the Great Depression.
The 20th Century
Graceland
Memphis, TN
Graceland was the home of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll, and is a shrine to one of the most influential entertainers of the 20th century.
The 20th Century
Fallingwater
Mill Run, PA
Fallingwater is Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece and perhaps the most famous house in American architecture.
The 20th Century
Wright Brothers National Memorial
Kill Devil Hills, NC
The Wright Brothers National Memorial marks the spot where human flight began.
The 20th Century
Grand Central Terminal
New York, NY
Grand Central Terminal is one of the world's great railroad stations and a Beaux-Arts masterpiece at the heart of Manhattan.
The 20th Century
Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt
Hyde Park, NY
Springwood is the only place in America where a president was born, kept a lifelong home, and was laid to rest.
The 20th Century
Sagamore Hill
Oyster Bay, NY
Sagamore Hill was the home of Theodore Roosevelt's heart.
The 20th Century
Stonewall Inn
New York, NY
In the early hours of June 28, 1969, patrons of a small Greenwich Village bar fought back against a police raid, and the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement was born.
The 20th Century
Robie House
Chicago, IL
With its dramatic cantilevered roofs sweeping low over ribbons of art glass windows, Robie House announced a fully American architecture, breaking decisively from European tradition to celebrate the flat horizontal lines of the Midwestern prairie.
The 20th Century
Taliesin
Spring Green, WI
Taliesin was where Frank Lloyd Wright retreated to remake both his personal life and his architecture, building a home into the very hillside of his family's ancestral Wisconsin valley.
The 20th Century
Taliesin West
Scottsdale, AZ
Rising from the rock and sand of the Sonoran Desert north of Scottsdale, Taliesin West shows Frank Lloyd Wright reinventing his architecture for an entirely different landscape than his native Midwest.
The 20th Century
Dealey Plaza
Dallas, TX
On a bright November afternoon in 1963, a presidential motorcade turned onto Elm Street in this small park and drove into one of the defining traumas of modern American history.
The 20th Century
Carnegie Hall
New York, NY
"How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice" — the old joke captures the venue's outsized place in American musical life.
The 20th Century
Apollo Theater
New York, NY
No stage did more to launch the careers that shaped 20th-century American popular music than the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
The 20th Century
TCL Chinese Theatre
Los Angeles, CA
Few sidewalks anywhere carry more star power than the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre, where handprints, footprints, and signatures of hundreds of Hollywood legends are pressed into concrete going back nearly a century.
The 20th Century
Launch Complex 39 (Kennedy Space Center)
Cape Canaveral, FL
From two pads on a low spit of Florida marshland, humanity left Earth for another world.
The 20th Century
Jefferson Memorial
Washington, DC
The Jefferson Memorial is the only presidential memorial modeled on a building its subject actually designed himself — a fitting tribute to the architect-president whose own words on liberty and religious freedom are carved into its walls.
The 20th Century
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Washington, DC
A stark, unornamented wall of names that broke every rule of heroic war memorial design — and, in doing so, became one of the most visited and emotionally powerful memorials in the world.
The 20th Century
Crazy Horse Memorial
Crazy Horse, SD
Conceived as an answer to Mount Rushmore's monument to American presidents, Crazy Horse Memorial is a still-unfinished, entirely privately funded mountain carving meant to honor Native American history and dignity on the same scale the nation gave its presidents.
The 20th Century
Hollywood Bowl
Los Angeles, CA
A natural canyon turned into one of the world's great outdoor concert venues, the Hollywood Bowl's iconic concentric-arch shell has hosted everyone from the Los Angeles Philharmonic's founding 'Symphonies Under the Stars' to the Beatles.
The 20th Century
Balboa Park
San Diego, CA
A 19th-century civic park transformed by two World's Fair-style expositions into one of the largest urban cultural parks in the United States, and the unlikely birthplace of the San Diego Zoo.
The 20th Century
Grand Canyon Village
Grand Canyon, AZ
A railroad tourist camp that grew, under the design hand of architect Mary Colter, into one of the most architecturally distinctive gateways to any American national park.
The 20th Century
Space Center Houston
Houston, TX
The room where humanity's Moon landing was directed from Earth, preserved down to the ashtrays and coffee cups of 1969, sits at the heart of the visitor center that lets the public walk through NASA's human spaceflight program.
The 20th Century
Sun Studio
Memphis, TN
A cramped storefront studio where a handful of sessions recorded by Sam Phillips helped invent rock and roll, launching Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis within a few short years of each other.
The 20th Century
Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio
Oak Park, IL
The home and design laboratory where a 22-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright invented the Prairie Style, and the place he abandoned in a scandal that reshaped both his life and the trajectory of American architecture.
The 20th Century
Harry S. Truman Home
Independence, MO
The house Harry Truman called home before, during, and after his presidency, left almost exactly as the Trumans lived in it, offering one of the most intimate surviving glimpses into a modern president's private life.
The 20th Century
Greenfield Village
Dearborn, MI
Henry Ford's tribute to the ordinary tools and workshops of American innovation, built by relocating the actual laboratory of Thomas Edison and the actual home of the Wright brothers to a single Michigan village.
The 20th Century
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Cleveland, OH
A glass pyramid on the shore of Lake Erie housing the artifacts of a genre born from radio, rebellion, and racial crossover, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame gave a permanent home to a history that for years existed only as an idea and an induction ceremony.
The 20th Century
United Nations Headquarters
New York, NY
Built on land donated by an American oil dynasty and designed by architects from a dozen countries, the UN Headquarters gave a fragile postwar experiment in international cooperation a permanent home overlooking the East River.

— Archival monographs —

Historical Essays